“Displacement”based on Acts 9:1-20 and John 21:1-19

April 10, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Before Jesus called them, most of the disciples had been fisherman. It was their occupation. They supported their families by fishing. Likely it was their identity too. They were multi-generational fisherman. They were part of fishing families and fishing communities. (Don’t worry, I don’t intend to make a metaphor out of this.)

I suspect that the story we read from John today comes from different origins than the other Easter stories in John. It got edited in as the third appearance, but it works pretty well as a stand alone story, and it likely was one. Peter is presented as the natural leader. He says he wants to go fishing, and everyone else says they’ll go with him. It makes a lot of sense that fisherman born and bred would return to the Sea in the midst of turmoil when they didn’t know what else to do.

I don’t know enough about fishing the Sea of Tiberias to know if a night’s fishing being utterly unsuccessful was common, but I’m also not entirely sure that the disciples would have spent much of their energy trying to catch fish that night. It seems that the comfort may have been the familiarity of the surroundings and the nighttime freedom to talk or not as they wished. It was a good place to grieve.

Now the bit in the story about casting the nets “to the other side” and having fish essentially leap into them seems like it is set up for allegory, but I’m going to leave those be and simply point out that in that moment Jesus was recognized. In fact, John recognized Jesus, but Peter jumped out of the boat to swim to him. People are different, and have different skills and responses. One can figure out what is going on, another is quick to respond with joy.

I’ve been trying to figure out why Peter would get dressed and THEN jump into the water, when most people would do it the other way. I guessed maybe it was a sign of respect for Jesus, but I looked it up in the Jewish Annotated New Testament and all they had to say was, “It is odd that Peter dresses and then jumps into the sea.”¹

The best part of this story happens when they all get to shore. Jesus has made a fire and prepared some fish and bread, although he adds to the fire some of the fish they’d caught. In the Emmaus story, the disciples know Jesus in the breaking of the bread, but in this story they knew him in the abundance he provided of the fish. Yet the way that he shares the food still rings with celebration of communion. “Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish.” (v. 13)

This is the first and only meal that it is said Jesus cooks. He makes them breakfast after they’ve been out on the water all night tending their souls. He provides for them when they need it most. It is an extraordinary little story in that way, Jesus is a bit more domestic than we otherwise see him. Before the resurrection he cared for people’s physical needs on a regular basis, but not as the cook. This is a bit earthier!

The story almost suggests that the disciples were silent through the meal, but we really don’t know. The sweet, strange story of the nets full of fish and breakfast waiting on the shore turns toward Peter giving him both an opportunity for forgiveness and a direction in life. Often this part of the story has gotten my fuller attention. Today I simply want to point out that the three questions seem likely to exist in order to erase the three denials that had earlier occurred. Secondly, the three questions have slightly different nuances, but they’re insignificant. Jesus instructs Peter to tend and feed the sheep and lambs as a response to Peter’s love for Jesus.

The work that had been Jesus’ is now passed on. In this case is is to Peter, but by extension to all of us. That’s the Easter story again, for those who are slow to pick up on it. At the end of this passage is a line I hadn’t really heard before. In the end of the conversation Jesus says to Peter, “Follow me.” I find the Gospel of John annoying at times, but it is also a work of brilliance. In John’s version of the call of the disciples, Jesus doesn’t call Peter! Peter’s brother Andrew started following Jesus and invited Peter to come along. Peter’s call to follow doesn’t happen until this conversation! It also become a call to all who hear – those who weren’t called in the beginning of the story are still called to follow by the end of it. Furthermore, the call to “follow” happens during the LAST vision of Jesus’ resurrection, in John. The following has to happen by the guidance of the Spirit and the capacity of the disciples to trust themselves to know what to do!

It has struck me this week how displacing all of this would have been for the disciples. They’d been displaced by choosing to travel with Jesus and had given up the lives they knew. Then they were displaced by the death of Jesus, and lost the life they’d come to know with him. That’s where we found them at the beginning of the story, trying to find their place again by returning to the lives they knew. Instead, by the end of today’s story all sense a security has been stripped from them. They are to continue the work of Jesus, but without Jesus. They are to upset the system of the Empire, without any promises of safety, and indeed Jesus points out that they too will suffer by tending and feeding the sheep and the lambs. The fishermen and their families from Galilee who wandered the Jewish countryside with Jesus end up settling in Jerusalem and leading the rest of the followers of The Way… lives still changed by the words “Follow me.”

I’m stuck as well that their lives moved from pretty “normal” to very abnormal. They were regular people, working hard to make their lives go as well as they could before they met Jesus. They were productive members of society, making money in one of the standard ways. They were contributing to society.

And then Jesus displaced them.

Just as Jesus didn’t work for money during his ministry, as far as I can tell, the apostles didn’t work for money again after his resurrection. They were so busy leading The Way, that they couldn’t. Other people’s offerings supported their lives.

Which is to say they “stopped” contributing to society. They were no longer productive workers. Isn’t that funny? The Protestant Work Ethic is a real thing, and in the USA many of us were practically suckled on it. Yet the followers of Jesus stepped out of the system of productivity in order to redistribute resources and teach another way. It is as if their lives were the Sabbath of the Hebrew Bible, a reminder that life is more than productivity and contributions to society, that we are made in the image of God, and we are whole already as we are. They began to live Sabbath – to focus on relationships and not on work. That’s some serious displacement.

There are rather amazing parallels between today’s Gospel lesson and the story of the conversion of Saul. For the first time, I noticed that the conversion wasn’t REALLY instantaneous, as I’ve often heard people describe it. Yes, he had an instant where he fell, and he became blind, and he had a conversation with Jesus (who was dead.) But he had the scales on his eyes for 3 days, while fasting, before Ananias comes to talk with him and they fall off. At that point he got baptized, but he was with the disciples for “several days” after that and THEN he began to preach about Jesus saying, “He is the Son of God.” (Which, just in case you didn’t know, was blaspheming the Emperor of the Roman Empire who claimed that particular title as one piece of his authority.)

Saul’s displacement happened in about a week. He thought he knew what his contribution to society was. In addition to making his living as a tent-maker (which he continued to do), his passion was caring for the faith by making sure that heresies and bad teaching didn’t take seed in the faith that formed his life. He was convinced that the followers of Jesus’ way were the problem, and he was willing to use his life to fix it – until this happened. Then he took his passion and conviction and used to FOR the good of The Way of Jesus.

Have you ever seen that video of a random person dancing to the beat of their own drum in random places? It ends up making the point that one person dancing is one person dancing! However, the moment a second person chooses to join in, the first time a follower joins in, it usually becomes a dance party. Sometimes it is one person who dances, sometimes it is hundreds, but the difference is not the first dancer – it is the second.

It is possible that Paul is the “second dancer” of The Way of Jesus. Jesus was the first dancer. He is the one who offered a new take on life and way to deny the powers of the world by focusing on the creative love of God. But Paul is the one who, by following, brought people along. I think the rest of the disciples would have continued to share the message and it would have mattered but only within Judaism. Paul was the one who took the message to the Gentiles, which is super ironic since he was the one who cared most about the faith of Judaism to begin with. He is also the one who pushes for full inclusion of Gentiles in The Way, without conversion to Judaism. Jesus may have founded a movement, but Paul made it popular.

Paul’s displacement pulled out of everything he cared about, including his own life, but gave him a way to change the history of the world. He did continue to make a living for himself, but his real contributions were in sharing a story he’d once found offensive enough to stop by any violent means necessary.

In seminary, as in much of Christianity, there was often a focus on stories of conversion. People talked about the rough lives they’d led, and when they’d connected with God anew, and how that had guided them to ministry. At times I’d get annoyed with the stories, but often I felt insufficient by not having a story of my own. I was raised in United Methodist Church that I loved, I went to church camp, I adored it, at 13 I first considered becoming a pastor, and I’d followed that path from that point on.

In class one day we were assigned to discuss something about conversion in a small group and my friend Andre, who had one of those“standard’ conversion stories offered me a great gift. He asked if I had been “converted” and I said no, and I think I hung my head in shame. We weren’t particularly close, but I think he’d listened to me very deeply to that point. He asked if there was a point in my life when I realized that although my life was good, not everyone else had it as easy. I looked up and said YES, and started telling the story of the first time I’d noticed. He smiled at me and said that I was one of the people with an inverted conversion story. My conversion was realizing how broken the world was and being moved to participate in healing it. Put another way, becoming aware of my privileges and that they weren’t shared was a form of conversion. That is a story that I’ve lived time and time again.

It has been displacement for me at times too. As it was for Peter, and for Paul, and as it has been for people who didn’t have a connection to the Divine and later found one. God messes things up. God displaces us so that we can be placed appropriately. And frankly, God seems to do it often. So the next time you are trying to contribute to the world and it all gets turned upside down, remember that God may be displacing you – for the sake of good. Amen

—

1 The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

April 10, 2016

“Shouting Stones” based on Psalm 118:1-2, 19-19; Luke 19:28-40

March 20, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I heard a story once of a United Methodist Church invited to be a part of a local Saint Patrick’s Day parade. It was a small church, they didn’t feel like they make much of a difference, but they were invited and they went! A few weeks ahead of time they’d left fliers along the parade route letting residents know that they’d be collecting underwear and socks for kids as they paraded. When the day came it was a bit cold and definitely cloudy. They were near the end of the parade, and not all of them wanted to go after all. But they did it anyway.

The parade route wound through a residential area and when the church group passed by (complete with a BIG sign), residents would yell after them “hey! Wait! I’ve got something for you!” and they’d watch as people ran into their houses and ran back out with the gifts for children. It was amazing, as not all of the residents seemed to have much to share.

Near the end of the route, standing in front of a gas station, came a young boy carrying as many cans of soup as he could hold. He stuck them in the arms of the ones closest to him and said, “These are for the hungry children!” The church didn’t correct him, they took the gift and added it to their pile.

Afterward, they reflected on their experience and realized that most of the people on that route weren’t church goers, didn’t have much to spare, and they might have though wouldn’t care about kids needing new socks … and yet they RAN to give their gifts! They didn’t want to be left behind. They -and that one young boy with the soup especially – CARED and they had gifts they wanted to offer. The church had made it possible for the people to give gifts they wanted to give!

In so many ways, that Saint Patrick’s Day parade embodies the spirit of Palm Sunday!

Now, Jesus wasn’t the only one going into Jerusalem around that time. The Passover was a holy celebration, and many pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem to celebrate it. The city got 5 times bigger at Passover with so many people coming in. In fact, that’s the reason that Pilate, as the Roman appointed governor came into the city at Passover. They were worried that with all those people together celebrating the Passover things might get unruly.

As a reminder, the Jewish holiday of Passover remembers God’s saving actions in freeing the Israelites from their oppressors in Egypt. So, a whole bunch of Israelites oppressed by the Roman Empire were gathering together in their former capital to celebrate God’s actions to free them from oppression, and it made their current oppressors nervous.

That’s why Pilate came in every year. It was a good time to have some extra Roman military power, to remind the people that they would not stand for a revolt or any sort of rebellion. Pilate came in with all the flash and glory of the Empire – showing of the Empire’s power and threatening anyone who would deny the Empire the right to rule Israel. He came in from the coast – from the west, riding a horse, with drums and golden eagle flags and flash and power.

Jesus came in from the East. He came riding on the donkey – fulfilling a Jewish prophesy about God’s appointed King who would free them from oppression. That is, Zechariah 9:9b, “Behold, your king is coming to you;

righteous and having salvation is he,

humble and mounted on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

Riding a donkey was also the way that King Solomon entered when he became king. In fact, I’ve heard it suggested in that in the ancient Middle East Kings rode horses to war, but rode donkeys when they came in peace.¹ Some of the people were at the Western Gate greeting the power of the Empire. Some of the people were parading with Jesus toward the Eastern gate. Most of them were people without any hope of access to power or money through the economic system that existed within the Roman Empire. Yet, they had hope that God’s actions through Jesus might make a difference for them.

They were excited and hopeful, and they were yelling. The Gospel says they were yelling, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!“ To our ears that may sound pretty standard. It certainly excesses exuberance, but it also just sounds like…. the Bible. So, if you aren’t paying attention to it, you might not notice that what they were saying was sedition!²

Israel was a part of the Roman Empire. Therefore, Caesar was the King – God was not, and Jesus was not. Rome ruled Israel, God did not.

Jesus was riding a donkey, which was the way that kings entered Jerusalem. He had a crowd around him supporting him. They were waving Palm branches, which were essentially the national flag of Israel, and they were proclaiming LOUDLY that Jesus was the king – and the one appointed by God. These were words and actions of a rebellion against the Empire – at exactly the same time that the army was coming into the city to stop rebellions.

There were some who tried to silence the crowds – to warn them of what would happen if the Roman Empire found out that people were yelling such things. But Jesus responds that they can’t be silenced. He suggests that the movement has begun and it is unstoppable. He uses the metaphor that if the people were silenced the stones would start shouting. As a child I took that literally, but these days I tend to think it means that the energy and hope of the movement couldn’t be silenced.

Jesus would end up dead by the end of the week, killed for leading a VIOLENT revolt against the Empire. Of course, it wasn’t violent, but it was a revolt. They thought that if they killed him, the movement would stop. We today are the proof that the stones would shout out – the movement can’t be silenced.

It is like the St. Patty’s day parade and the people running from their homes with their hands full of underwear. You’d think they didn’t have anything to give, but it didn’t stop them from giving it! You’d think the Israelite peasants would be too scared to rebel, but they were unstoppable. You’d think the movement started by a backwater Jew in an an Empire from 2000 years ago would have stopped by now, but it hasn’t. The stones still cry out.

For more than a year now I’ve been working with the Love Your Neighbor Coalition in preparation for General Conference in May. As a person who has studied math, and a person paying attention to demographics in The United Methodist Church I have a lot of clarity about what to expect from General Conference: a whole lot of pain and a hard shift towards a more conservative church. The question is how conservative it will become. There have been a lot of times when I’ve wondered why I’m doing progressive organizing in a church where putting our stamp of approval on a piece of legislation almost guarantees that it won’t pass. There have been plenty of times since my first trip to General Conference in 2004 where I have wondered why I stay in this denomination that does such great harm to my sisters and brothers in faith who are lesbian, gay, and bisexual.

I don’t think the people who waved palm branches and shouted, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” were stupid. They knew for sure that it was an act of rebellion, they knew it was seriously dangerous for them and for Jesus, and I suspect they knew that it was REALLY REALLY unlikely that Jesus would live to be king. I can’t be sure what any of them thought, but the Gospels themselves make it clear that Jesus knew the actions of Palm Sunday would get him killed, and I suspect most of the participants did too.

So why did they do it? They were desperate and there was very little reason to have hope outside of the Jesus movement. Peasants were dying young after living lives of hard labor and undernourishment. There wasn’t any reason to believe that would change on its own. Jesus brought hope. He brought a message that was different: showing people ways to work together to have enough, suggesting that the values of the world were all messed up, seeing and caring about women, children, people who were ill or injured, and people living in poverty. Jesus was the living reminder that God still cared, that steadfast love endures forever. They voted for that with their lives and their livelihoods. The cloaks they spread were often the only thing keeping them alive at night, protecting them from the desert night’s chill, and they choose to lay their cloaks before Jesus just like they choose to shout the words that could get them all killed.

They knew they might all die, and it was worth it anyway to have a reason to hope in God.

That sure makes General Conference seem less important! But truth be told, as much as I know that General Conference will be a disaster from a progressive perspective, I have a tiny bit of hope. There are some good things that might happen: legislation written by UM clergy with disabilities to expand the denomination’s care for people with disabilities will likely pass! The work done by Fossil Free UMC to get the denomination’s resources out of fossil fuels might pass and similar work done to get resources out of companies that support the occupation of Palestine might too. (And since our pension plan is worth ~$21 billion, what we do with our investments MATTERS.) And maybe, just maybe, even though it is a long shot, we might pass the legislation that creates global equity in The United Methodist Church and makes us true sisters and brothers with United Methodists outside of the United States.

Most of the injustices of the church will stand, I suspect there will be MORE injustice when we’re done with General Conference then there are now, and yet I’m going to go and work on organizing the progressive voice because I believe that calling for justice in the church and the world is the work of God. And maybe, just maybe, the Spirit will find a way to bring more good than bad out of it all. God has done weirder things already, even if it seems statistically unlikely to me!

Those Palm Sunday crowds took risks for the sake of hope.

They paid attention to what God was up to, even when chances were very slim that God’s loving-kindness and justice would end up in charge. They celebrated God, and they celebrated hope, and they came together cheering for possibility – even though it was dangerous to their LIVES.

They took risks for the sake of hope.

May we do the same.

Amen

___

1 http://www.gotquestions.org/king-ride-donkey.html

2The gist of this whole sermon comes from Marcus Borg and John Dominc Crossan’s book “The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem” (Harper Collins: 2006). This is one of the most important books I’ve read in terms of reframing my understanding of Palm Sunday, and a whole lot of other things.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

March 20, 2016

“Questions about Mary (of Bethany)”based on John 12:1-8

March 13, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

A few years ago at Thanksgiving, my immediate family spent time watching videos from the years my brother and I were kids. My grandfather had acquired a video camera when I was about 8, and I have very clear memories of trying to avoid the camera like the plague, although I seemingly failed. There were a lot of learnings in the watching of those videos, but I want to tell you today about just one. I learned that my grandfather had an accent!

This was mind blowing information for me. We were VERY close to our grandparents growing up, we spent all holidays and birthdays together, and weekends at their house. He was probably my favorite person to ever walk the face of the earth, and it is because of how he loved me that I can comprehend God’s love as unconditional.

However, I didn’t know he had an accent. He died when I was TWENTY, and I didn’t know. It wasn’t until he’d been dead for more than a decade and then I heard his voice again that I was able to hear it. Until that point he’d been so close to me that it hadn’t occurred to me that anything was out of the ordinary about him – mostly I guess because he was my ordinary. It is also possible that I’m an idiot. I’m not sure.

But I’m going with the point that overfamiliarity can blind us. I’m going with that point because I was reading the gospel this week and the WORLD’S MOST OBVIOUS question jumped out at me. It is, of course, not one that I’ve ever thought over before, even though I’ve heard this story and ones like it plenty of times, and likely preached them – often.

Ready?

Why were Martha, Mary, and Lazarus all living together? They’re presented as adults, and their own parents aren’t mentioned. They are said to be siblings, but no spouses are mentioned, and they’re all in the same household. This wasn’t a THING. Unlike 2016 where singleness in adulthood is normal, and this would simply be a notable attribute along the lines of “Oh, yeah, Mary’s cool. In fact, she’s so cool that she can manage to live with her sister and brother! They rent a place in Bellevue.”

Adult singleness and adult siblings living together was significantly less common 2000 years ago in Israel. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to identify a lot of scholarship on this issue. It seems, as per normal, that my questions aren’t what anyone else wants to answer. I did find a few articles, but I have some questions about the validity of their scholarship.¹ Basically there appear to be a few theories about why Martha, Mary, and Lazarus are all living together in their adulthoods:

They are actually quite young, and in fact too young to be married. This would be REALLY young, as average marriage age (of women) was between 14 and 16.

The women may be widows who didn’t remarry.

Martha and Mary may have “belonged to an ascetic sect and had chosen singleness and celibacy.”²

In particular, “It is believed that a colony of ascetics (perhaps Essenes) lived in Bethany. Literary evidence from one the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that these ascetics had a hospice in Bethany for the ritually unclean, which included lepers . The ascetics were known for their acts of charity and it is most likely that their hospice also helped and accommodated the poor and destitute.”³

There are a few other little things that I learned along the way in asking this question that I just have to share with you because they’re wonderful. First of all, Martha may not have been Martha’s name. “The name ‘Martha’ is the feminine form of an Aramaic word meaning ‘lord’ or ‘master’, so ‘Martha’ may be a title rather than a name.”⁴ Also, in all of the gospels, Martha is mentioned first which means that she likely was the older, so this makes all the more sense. This implies that no matter how this went down, Jesus kept visiting a female dominated household. (Also, I sort of want to name a daughter Martha now.)

Next, it seems likely that Lazarus was their little brother. He never has a speaking role, which would make the most sense if he was young. This also makes his death (which was related in the chapter prior to our gospel reading today) all the more sad. I think it is unlikely that Lazarus was a child though. Jesus was really open minded, and broke open barriers with his “let the children come to me” line, but I don’t think that a child would be referred to as “he whom you love”. That, for me, suggests that they may not have all been that young. If Lazarus was “an adult” (whatever that meant at the time, but at least a teenager) but was the younger brother, then Martha and Mary were clearly above normal marrying age. Yet, I would guess that if Lazarus was an adult then he’d be called Master of the household. Perhaps Lazarus was a man with special needs, which would make this all even more awesome.

Yet, really, who knows?

There is always the third option. Bethany, the town in which they’re said to reside, means “Poor House” or “House of Misery”.⁵ It is even suggested that as “Bethany was only two miles from Jerusalem which made it a perfect location for a hospice for pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem who became ritually unclean and were unable to participate in the Jewish festivals.”⁶ As residents of Bethany, it isn’t all that unlikely that the family was involved in running a hospice of sorts. In fact, it would make sense out of this story itself! How did Mary happen to have a nard of perfume worth a year’s wages for a laborer? It would be reasonable that she might have gotten it as a gift from a wealthy former patient.

On the other hand, it could just be that this was a wealthy family headed by Martha, and supportive of Jesus. We don’t know. If they weren’t running a hospice, then it is notable that they had a house large enough to offer hospitality to Jesus AND his disciples (and their families) and the capacity to feed them all, which would be consistent with having enough wealth to own expensive perfume as well. They wouldn’t be the only wealthy, female dominated household that identified with the early Jesus movement either, so that could be.

While I’m muddying waters, I also want to mention that I’m pretty confused about how Jesus MET these siblings anyway. He’s from up north, in Galilee. Its almost a 100 miles away. He is clearly really close to them, and they show up in all the Gospels. This family matters to Jesus. But he spends his life and ministry in Galilee and only visits Jerusalem. In the gospel of John, Jesus is killed because he raises Lazarus from the dead, but he is called to their house because of his existent relationship with them, which we haven’t heard about until he is called. He was already in the area though. How did they know each other? How did they become so close? Mary presents as a disciple. Lazarus is called beloved. Martha and Mary both presume the right to chide Jesus. Don’t you just want to know?

Me too. But I have no theories on this. Sometimes love happens between people (including the deep friendship kind), and it is always amazing. It seems it was amazing for Jesus too. There is perhaps ONE clue. The passage states that the perfume filled the room. That is, it says, “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” This sounds A LOT like Song of Solomon 1:12, “While the king was on his couch, my nard gave forth its fragrance.” Maybe, just maybe, Jesus and Mary were courting. This is mostly fun because when people tend to theorize about romantic relationships for Jesus, they usually pick Mary of Magdala instead of Mary of Bethany. I’m a rebel.

Now, I have two last things to clarify, this time about our gospel lesson in particular. John’s story is different from the other versions of this story. The setting is different (in the synoptics it happens at Simon the Leper’s house), the woman is different (not a prostitute here), and the location of the perfume is different (it is on his head in the other versions). Only John tells this crazy story of Mary anointing his FEET and them wiping them off with her HAIR. It is also only John who presents the action of Jesus on the last night he was with them as being FOOT WASHING and not the Last Supper. That means that Mary’s action of washing Jesus feet comes before Jesus chooses to wash his disciples’ feet… almost as if Jesus found the experience so moving that he let it define his ritual of goodbye to his followers.

Also, when Jesus says, “the poor you will always have with you” he is likely quoting Deuteronomy 15:11 which in the NRSV reads “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’” It isn’t a passive acceptance of poverty (which I always worried about) but a commandment to share. However, even as he quotes the scripture, he goes on to say, “BUT you will not always have me.” Whoever poured the perfume, wherever, in all the stories Jesus defends the action. One commentator says, “What church serious about discipleship does not struggle with the tension between money spent in beautiful acts of worship and money spent on behalf of the poor?”⁷ AMEN to that. The affirmation of this passage is of that tension, that both beauty and a response to poverty are necessary.

As in this sermon, life often has more questions than answers. This passage sure does, even though its familiarity can be blinding. That’s true of a lot of the Bible, at least for me. There are some great take aways from this, even in the midst of all the questions though: Jesus had the capacity to form deep, meaningful friendships – including with strong women. Therefore relationships REALLY matter. Beauty has inherent value, as does taking care of each other. And the way we follow is a way of servant leadership – of foot washing – and radical expression of love. May both the questions and the answer bless us all this week. Amen

1Issues: lack of doctorate; way of describing Christianity; and lack of footnotes. Presumably the last one should matter the most, as I don’t have a doctorate either.

2“Martha, Mary, and Lazarus of Bethany” in New Life written by Marg Mowczko found at http://newlife.id.au/christian-living/martha-mary-and-lazarus-of-bethany/ on March 12, 2016.

3Ibid

4Ibid. (I really liked this article, I just wish it was better footnoted…)

5Ibid

6Ibid

7H. Stephen Shoemaker, “Homiletical Perspective on John 12:1-8” in Feasting on the Word Year C, Volume 2 ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) p. 145.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

March 13, 2016

“The Mystery of God – A Personal Take” by…

March 9, 2016February 15, 2020
by Administrator

I am
honored to take my place in this pulpit.
It has a reputation for allowing free expression, and I am sure that I
am not the only one who might have expressed views and opinions regarded as
outside the current dogmas of the Church.
This is not the first time I am asked to give a sermon in a Methodist
Church. I grew up in a Primitive
Methodist Church and my Father was a Lay Preacher for 50 years. You see in England in the 1940’s, the
Methodists did not have sufficient full-time ministers for one at every church
and chapel. The churches were organized
into 5 to 10 in a circuit with perhaps half the number of full-time ministers,
hence the need for Lay preachers to fill the vacant spots. So in my youth I was in training to be a Lay
preacher and occasionally was asked to conduct the services at small chapels in
the countryside of North-West England.
The one piece of advice I was given by an old gentleman at one of the
Chapels was “Be sure to include the Lord Jesus in every one of your sermons”. So here goes:

We each
one of us is aware that we have been endowed with both Reason and Heart. At
times we can be rational and at other times we act and behave
irrationally. We have been given such
amazing characteristics such as imagination, daring, patience, fortitude and
peace that we can envisage such spectacular feats as landing humans on the
Planet Mars; yet we also have within us characteristics such as jealousy, hate,
idleness and often a desire for War. So
this exploration of the Mystery of God is my attempt to try to understand the
concept of God as expressed in the Bible and use my personal rationality as far
as possible, recognizing that somewhere along, Faith and Belief are heavily
involved.

I’m
starting with three assumptions as a basis for my discourse:

First: That since we are here in this place at this time,
that we all believe in God, and we are here to worship him, or her, or it.

Second: That we can all agree in the concept of God the
Creator of all things, Omnipotent, God only Wise.

Third: That we are
each of us made in the Image of God.

Now,
each of us has a personal view of other characteristics that we may project and
I propose to relate some of my questions, truths and speculations that that I
have recently had pause to consider. Living in a Retirement Community with many
essential services provided, leaves time to remember the past and assess one’s
life journey.

The
Bible, particularly the Old Testament, cites many stories of a person’s,
usually a man’s, encounter with God, although God never shows himself. For instance in the Garden of Eden, Adam and
Eve were created with Free Will, the ability to choose, and they ate of the
Tree of Good and Evil; they encounter God who knows they have disobeyed his
commandment to eat only the Tree of Life, and for that they must leave the
Garden and henceforth their lives will involve toil and pain. In our first lesson, we are given the story
of Moses and his encounter with God and the burning bush on Mt. Horeb. Moses wants to be given a name so he can tell
the people in slavery who it was that sent him there. And God’s answer is “I AM that I AM” or an
alternative translation of the Hebrew is “I AM that I AM or What or Will BE”.

I
believe we can all agree in the belief of God the Creator of THE Universe,
though to me it seems there may not be one, but in fact, many parallel
universes that exist but which we are unable to see or experience. If you want an easy metaphor of such parallel
universes, just surf your cable TV and witness the separate existences that
occur that you only are aware of when you tune in to that particular channel.

If you
believe with me that each of us is made in the image of God, then the inverse
of that is that HE, SHE, or IT (or as modern theologians would call God – “The
Ground of our Being”) must possess all our characteristics in Spades & much
more. Since I was trained as a
Physicist, I must assume God is the Supreme Physicist, the most capable
Experimenter & the All-knowing Theoretician. So what if our Universe is a Grand
Experiment? As a physicist we are not
uncomfortable with parallel universes or with the concept of a Universe of
Opposites. Pythagorus (who you all know
from his famous Geometric Theorem) was also a philosopher & religious
teacher who lived some 500 years before the Christian Era, and he drew up a
Table of Ten Opposites describing our universe: (in those days the number 10
was a special number)

Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Unity Plurality
Right Left
Male Female
at
Rest in Motion
Straight Curved
Light Darkness
Good Evil
Square Oblong

We can add many more – Physicists now know there is Matter
and Anti-matter, an electron & a
positron, while there is a neutrino, a friend of mine who heads a Govt. Lab in
Virginia has recently had an appeal before Congress to spend several hundred
million dollars of public’s money to fund an experiment to attempt to discover
the anti-neutrino. There is also Joy and Pain!
So I believe that God must in fact be a Duality – A God of both Positives
and Negatives, a God of both Good and Evil.
And that presents for me a Major Dilemma. How to understand the occurrence of Pain and
Suffering that appears to be inflicted on both good and bad people?

So, from
what I have said, might we infer What God’s Strategy for Mankind might be?

If you
follow me, I am suggesting that our Universe is an experiment in Free Will, and
God wants to see how humankind handles it, and the Bible indicates that God
wants us to walk this balance between Good and Evil and over time God has tried
several different techniques to send messages to attempt to make it clear as to
how humankind should conduct itself. The
early books of the Bible suggest to me that God chose “Judgement” initially to
let people know his ways; through Moses he attempted to send a list of
Commandments, still later he chose to send messages through the Prophets. In the case of David, he first called Samuel
to be his messenger who then much later used him to anoint David to be King. However
it was many years before David was actually installed as King of Israel. You can probably think of many other ways the
books of the Old Testament describe God’s action to convince his chosen people
to walk the straight path. Finally, as
John describes in his account of the coming of Jesus – God sent his only
begotten Son that we could be saved and St. Paul said that not only Jews, but
all people could be part of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Back of
all this is a personal awareness of God’s identity. The early Jews called God “Jaweh”, and later
David used the term “Adonai” and these have come down to us using the vowels of
one and the consonants of the other as “Jehovah”. We in First Methodist recently heard Gendis
Khan, a Moslem and the Iman from the Schenectady Mosque, describe God’s identity
as Justice. Pope Francis has recently
authored a book entitled “The name of God is Mercy”. I personally believe that “God is Love”, and
God expressed that Love in sending his only begotten Son to earth in order to
show us how to walk the balance between Good and Evil.

It is
my belief that God has a purpose for each of us. For sure, we can only do our
best in the present. As illustrated by
the story of Samuel and David, God’s timetable is completely different from our
own. As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
wrote – Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward.

Therefore, go forward with courage and hope and obey Jesus’s Commandment
– Thou shall Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind and Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. AMEN.

Sermon March 6, 2016

�

“Strange Prophetic Voices” based on Isaiah 55:1-9 and Luke 13:1-9

February 29, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I once asked a confirmation class about joy. They said that the shortest spurts of happiness come from material gifts, while the longest living joy comes from relationships. They understood, as well, that happiness is fleeting, but joy comes from within.

When I prepare funerals, I ask families to tell me what the person loved. Almost always the first answer is relational – spouse, children, family, friends, church family, all of the above…. and then come the answers that are active: gardening, sports, some club, travel, cooking, work etc. (Sometimes sports affiliation arise as well. Loving or hating the Yankees is, apparently, identity forming.) Almost always, the list of what a person loves fits into “relationships” and “activities.”

At times, I wonder how that question would be answered for me. I’m sure just about anyone could say people and skiing and Sky Lake, but beyond that its not fully clear. Our concept of what we love may be different than what others see of us. What we love is visible by what we DO, not just what we think about doing. I wonder how what I do is different from what I think.

Hopefully what we DO, what we spend our time on and show our love for, are the rich food and bread that truly feed us. That is, we seek to live so that the places we put our love may be the ones that feed our inner spring of joy. The book of Isaiah almost outdoes itself with the questions of 55:2: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” Why DO we spend our time on activities that don’t feed our souls? Why DO we spend money on things that won’t feed any part of us?

This is a passage that scholars believe was written during the exile. That is, the first hearers were in captivity in a foreign land. I don’t know how Babylonians treated their war captives for sure, but it seems reasonable to assume that they were similar to most other nations throughout time. I doubt there was rich food to be had, nor milk. There may have been bread, and lousy wine, but maybe not a lot of it. I don’t know if they were getting wages, but if they were, they were likely not very high. I doubt as well that they had much choice about what they did with their labor.

On that basis, this strange prophecy seems pie in the sky high. The suggestion is that God will provide abundant wine and milk, bread and rich food – for free. These weren’t things they were getting at all. God is said to reaffirm God’s love for David and the Davidic covenant, but the king’s line had been killed off. It is said that the nations will run to Israel, but Israel can’t even go home. Why would Isaiah say such words to people who knew better?

They’d gone without enough food for a long time. They knew that God hadn’t provided. They’d labored for other people’s wealth for a long time. They knew that God hadn’t intervened.

This is a passage that indicates that God is going to change God’s mind and choose to take care of the people again, after God has intentionally chosen not to for a while. After all, it ends with a call to repentance, suggesting that God wants to give these good gifts, but that they are contingent on the people’s choice to return to God. This is the point where I get squirmy. It sounds a lot like preaching to the Syrian refugees that if they return to “right worship” and “regular prayer” that God will take care of them again.

Yet, it speaks a deep truth. In the book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” David Graeber suggests that all the world’s major religions emerged as counters to the world’s markets. As market economies came into being, and dehumanized in profound ways (paid armies, unraveling of community ties, interest, debt slavery, etc) there was a need for a voice to call into question the standards of the market. Each of the world’s religions argues against usury (high interest), affirms the value of human life, calls on people to treat each other as precious, rebukes the acquisition of excessive material goods, and claims that the deeper meaning of life cannot be bought nor sold. That is, each of the major world religions argues against the underlying principles of the world’s markets. Graeber goes further to indicate how the various ways that markets developed around the world impacted the ways that each of the religions took on different stances and flavors.

Isaiah’s call to repentance is a stronghold of this principle. Even speaking to captives in a foreign land, he calls them away from the principles of the market into the principles of God. Isaiah refuses the idea that access to food should be reserved to those who have money! Isaiah suggests that God offers the good stuff without cost, upsetting the whole system. Isaiah diminishes the value of work itself as a means of survival. (It is pretty socialist, I’ll admit. Then again, capitalism isn’t a Biblical value.) Isaiah calls the people out of the system that dehumanizes and into a relationship with God that can vaccinate them against the values of the market.

Jesus’ parable does some similar things. May we remember that nurturing a tree in the desert of Israel takes serious resources. Water is scarce, and trees need water! (Think the crisis of almond farming in CA during this epic drought.) Fertile soil takes effort and resources. Market economies would suggest that the tree was wasting preciously allocated resources.

Yet, the gardener doesn’t want to give up on the tree that has been wasting resources though. Instead, the gardner wants to GIVE MORE to that tree – to bury it in manure and give it every chance it might have to bear fruit. Rather than blame the tree, the gardener seems to take blame on himself, for not giving it all it needs. This doesn’t make sense! It makes sense to uproot the tree and put in a new one – if we are talking about trees. More likely this passage is about Israel’s spiritual condition (because that’s how the metaphor usually goes in the Bible). Like Isaiah, this passage is a call to repentance.

Isn’t it interesting though, to reconsider repentance? What if it isn’t about sins in the ways that it so often as been discussed, but rather is about turning way from the morals of the market economy and turning to the morals of God and God’s kin-dom? Remember, just in case I haven’t said it recently, that the Bible indicates that our work as Jesus followers is to transform the world we have into one where everyone has enough and the gifts of life abundant are shared among everyone – the kin-dom. Doesn’t that take the sting out of repentance and make it really awesome? (#ThingsNoOneExpectedThePreacherToSay)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’m happy to say that the Gospel theologically debunks the issues that the Isaiah passage presents! The Isaiah passage, in case you forgot, implies that exile is the fault of the people for not being sufficiently faithful to God. This is a pretty normal perspective in the Bible, although not the only one. It is probably fair to call it the Deuteronomy perspective. It may also be worth remembering that the end of the exile came about 500 years before Jesus was born, but the meantime hadn’t been great for the Jews. First they were a vassal state of Persia (although they got to go home, which was great), and then Greece, and then Rome. So the wounds of the exile were still present among the Jews.

The two particular problems that get named are unique to Luke, unknown in other sources, and yet feasible historically. The first is the murder of a bunch of Galileans in Jerusalem while they were bringing ritual sacrifices to the temple. Historically speaking, if this happened, it was assumed that they were part of a violent revolt against the empire. That’s feasible. The second is the death of a group of people when part of the wall of Jerusalem fell on them. The existence of a tower there hasn’t been confirmed, but it is a place where it would have made sense to have a tower.

The point, however, that is made is that the people didn’t die because God was punishing them. They were no different from everyone else. Those who lived couldn’t claim to be alive because they were better. Death and destruction is not a punishment from God, nor and life abundant a sign of God’s favor. Those premises are rejected, and it has significant consequences for understanding the world and the Bible. Of course, it also gets turned into a call for repentance, because it is Lent and all scriptures call for repentance. Good thing we found a way to LIKE repentance.

The scriptures serve to remind us to concentrate on the things we love and the things that bring us life. Joy can’t be purchased. The premises of the market are wrong. We need not be distracted by them, particularly because it makes it harder to the markets to account for the ways they dehumanize God’s beloved people.

Seek joy where it can be found: in relationships with people you love and activities you deeply enjoy. That, it turns out, is part of turning the world upside down – to how God would have it be. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 28, 2016

“Seriously, Was Jesus Crazy?” based on Luke 13:31-35

February 21, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I find this Gospel distressing. Most of the time when I read the Gospel I find myself challenged by the calls for deeper humanity. Sometimes I find myself confused. This is one of the weeks when I am simply distressed. Maybe Jesus really was crazy, and I’ve devoted my life to following a crazy man.

I keep thinking about Simone Weil, a French agnostic-Jewish-mystic woman who was strongly attracted to the stories of Jesus. She was brilliant and profound, her writings at one and the same time make more sense than anything ever AND make no sense at all. She died during WWII in the United States, at the age of 34, because she refused to eat more food than the rations given in occupied France, and she had tuberculous and couldn’t survive on such little food. She might have been crazy, or she might have been one of the few people in all the world who wasn’t, and I can never quite tell.

Often, that seems to be a principle that apples to Jesus as well, but that’s not what I’m taking about in reference to this Gospel lesson. In this one, at least to begin with, Jesus appears to make no sense at all.

The Pharisees, who were not Jesus supporters, break away from their usual distain to let him know that the Roman appointed leader of Galilee (Herod) wants to kill him. They think he should leave. Jesus, you’ve probably heard of him, he’s the one known to say “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” and “let the children come to me”, you know, that guy … Jesus responds with an insult to Herod.

He tells them to go tell “that fox” (which is in NO POSSIBLE WAY anything but an insult) that he’ll go in three days when he darn well wants to. Furthermore, they’ll told to inform Herod that he can’t kill Jesus because Jesus can only be killed in Jerusalem. Then he talks about how much he loves Jerusalem. Then he makes an off the wall prediction, one that I can’t even summarize, so let’s hear it again, “I tell you, you certainly won’t see me again until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

He sounds like he is struggling with schizophrenia and grandiose delusions.

So, I decided to preach on it. Presumably because there is something wrong with me involving never taking the easy way out. Then, because I decided to preach on it, I had to do research on it, and it turns out there may be a few contextual things that make him seem a bit more sane.

First of all, according the Jesus Seminar, most of the really weird stuff is Luke putting words into Jesus’ mouth to support his own story, and not Jesus himself. They say, “There are…strong reasons for regarding the statements attributed to Jesus in this passage as the literary creations of Luke rather than the remembered sayings of Jesus: (1) The phrasing of v. 32 reflects Luke’s conception of his gospel: Jesus exorcises demons and cures people for two days, then on the third day he reaches his “end” in Jerusalem. This is the plan of Luke’s story. (2) The second saying, v. 33, is cast in Luke’s most characteristic theological formula: it states what ‘must’ (Greek: dei, ‘it is necessary’) take place, because it fulfills the divine plan (compare Luke 9:22, 24:44, Acts 1:16, 9:6, 16; 23:11, 27:24) (3) These sayings do not appear in Q nor in any other written gospel. They are attested to only in Luke.”¹ This however, only gets us so far as to ask if Luke is crazy instead of Jesus, if he put the words into Jesus’ mouth as a way of trying to attract people to the story of Jesus.

There is a second piece of context that helps even more. Several scholars pointed out that Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, who was the tetarch of Galilee and Perea was likely not a fan of Jesus’ nor was Jesus a fan of his. It is entirely feasible that this interaction is laced with deep politics, whether it is the words of Jesus or Luke. A scholar points out that, “During his Galilean ministry, [Jesus] never entered two cities particularly associated with Antipas: Sepphoris, which was his first capital, and Tiberias, which Antipas build to replace Sepphoris.”²

So Herod Antipas was an agent of Rome, and therefore represented much of what Jesus and his kin-dom stood against. Jesus seems to avoid him. Jesus likely thought that having a Roman tetarch on the throne that should belong to a son of David was wrong. Herod Antipas, who was charged with keeping the peace, likely wasn’t happy with Jesus either as a follower of the rabble rousing John the Baptist (who he is said to have had killed) or as a rabble rouser himself. As we’ve mentioned, this encounter is unique to Luke, who is also the only Gospel writer to give Herod a role in the death of Jesus. So, there is some literary foreshadowing happening here as well.

Jesus is approached, in the beginning of this little story by the Pharisees. Another scholar notices this saying,

“What is peculiar about this ostensibly protective warning is that the Pharisees have, to this point in the Gospel story, not been Jesus’ friends. They have been among those most threatened by the topsy-turvy kingdom Jesus heralds, among those ‘first’ who may end up ‘last.” Why, suddenly, are these particular Pharisees concerned for his safety? More than likely they have ulterior motives. Possibly they are in league with Herod and hope to drive Jesus out of Herod’s jurisdiction, into the arms of Pilate and Pilate’s responsibility. Then, like a state governor in our day passing on responsibility to federal authorities, at least Herod cannot be blamed for the results of this troublemaker’s actions. Maybe Pilate can figure out a way to get rid of Jesus altogether.

It is admittedly speculative to guess at the motives of those who came to Jesus with Herod’s threat. What is clear is that Jesus, in any event, responds to the outwardly friendly warning as if it were an instance of political machination. ‘Go and tell that fox for me…’ he says, revealing that he knows these Pharisees are in cahoots with the conniving, calculating Herod (v. 32) To use the parlance of our day, Jesus ‘steps up’ to Herod’s oblique, veiled challenge. He lets the Pharisees and Herod know that he is not politically naive.”

Which, I have to say, takes almost all the sting out of the passage for me, and turns it around to being rather interesting. I haven’t heard it here, but within the Church at large I’ve been told to keep Jesus away from politics and visa versa. This has never made any sense to me, as it is pretty clear that politics mattered to Jesus, and got him killed. Furthermore, if the premise of government is that it is at work to create a just, safe, and orderly society for its citizens (I’m not SURE that is the premise, but I like to pretend it is), then the followers of Jesus have a profound responsibility to help it along. Jesus was about building the kin-dom of God, and the work of the followers of Jesus’ way is to continue building the kin-dom of God. The kin-dom of God is the place where all of God’s people (ah hem, all people – same thing) are able to live together in peace because everyone has what they need. While we can’t expect to get there simply through government, we can’t get there without good government either.

The work of followers of Jesus is help the government pay attention to the ways that our society fails its people, and to help the government fix it. To follow Jesus requires a certain level of political activism. I’m not convinced the system (government) will work without being called out when it fails. Society can get confused about who matters, and assume it is the rich and powerful. It is the work of the people who listen for the voice of God to counter that claim and remind everyone that God’s value is universal, and ours needs to be as well.

So, maybe he wasn’t crazy, and maybe this isn’t the worst Gospel lesson ever. I’m cool with that. In fact, I rather like Jesus calling out Herod in Herod’s own game, and I like him being smarter than the political system. I like the reminder that not even Jesus got to be spiritual all the time and be “too good” for politics. (Which is a very time relevant reminder as the presidential campaign season tempt many of us to decry the system as broken beyond repair and thereby excuse ourselves from the process.) Life involves systems of power, many of which are corrupt, and you have to engage with them. Sometimes, when you are wise and wily like Jesus, you get to upset them and make them better.

There is one more interesting piece of the Gospel. Jesus claims that he can only be killed in Jerusalem. Likely this is Luke’s way of suggesting that the death of Jesus couldn’t happen outside of God’s decision to let it happen, and that fits Luke. But in the same breath that Jesus names his expectation of being killed in the city, he shares his love and yearning for the city. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” The text is reminiscence of parts of the Hebrew Bible, it is not particularly unique. Yet it is beautiful. Both God and Jesus are said to yearn to gather the people together and take care of them. The imagery of a hen gathering her chicks under her wings is powerfully comforting.

My friend the Rev. Dr. Barbara Thornington Green has very long arms, and many grandchildren. When faced with this passage she has spoken of it as deep truth. She YEARNS to have all of her children and grandchildren gathered all up, in her arms, where she can love them and keep them safe. She stretchers out her long arms to express the yearning and I can see all at once the hen with her chicks, my friend with her family, and God with us.

Jesus says this about the city that will kill him, while offering a political warning to another leader who would have him killed. The political was certainly personal with him! Yet, deadly as it was, it didn’t stop him from loving. Which might be crazy, but then again might be the only sane thing that could have been done.

May we learn from Jesus how to love so well, even if it makes us look a little crazy. Amen

1Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 349.

2Leslie J. Hoppe“Exegetical Perspective of Luke 13:31-35” in Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 2 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 69.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 21, 2016

“On Bread” based on Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Luke 4:1-13

February 14, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It does not require an advanced degree in logic, nor a working knowledge of Greek to have a big question about this passage. Here we go: as Jesus was alone in the desert until the questionable appearance of the Tempter, there was no one there to witness and tell the story. Furthermore, I’m comfortable guessing that Jesus didn’t tell his disciples so they could write it down later. It feels too brag-y for that. These two factors decrease the likelihood that this is the telling of a story that happened, and increase the likelihood that the story is being told to make a point (or points?).

The story shows up in Mark and Matthew as well, with some changes, meaning that a bunch of people found it worthwhile. So, what value is there in telling a story of Jesus’ temptation? Let’s start by considering it’s location in Luke. The story of Jesus’ birth and childhood take up Luke 1 and 2. Luke 3 mostly concerns John the Baptist – his ministry, teaching, and imprisonment – and then moves on to Jesus’ baptism and then Jesus’ genealogy. Then we get this story, which is followed by Jesus’ first teachings and then his first healing and THEN the call of the disciples. This story is really early, as if it is trying to clarify who Jesus is.

I found a few excellent theories on what is going on here. The Jesus seminar says, “Luke utilizes this story in the manner of a Greco-Roman biography: he has placed an ordeal story between an account of the hero’s remarkable birth and the beginning of his career, as a way of foreshadowing his life and destiny.”¹ That seems fair, yet still leave me wondering why THIS story is the one chosen.

Alan Culpepper in the New Interpreter’s Bible comes up with a number of theories, I’m going to share only the ones I found enlightening. He suggests that for those who had been expecting a Messiah, there were significant questions about what kind of Messiah would come. Would the Messiah be a royal Messiah bringing back the kingdom of Israel? Would the Messiah be a priestly Messiah purifying the rituals of the Temple? This story clarifies that Jesus won’t misuse his power and isn’t going to do party tricks with his power either. At the very least then, if he won’t misuse his power, he won’t be a bad king, and if he won’t do party trick with his power, he won’t be a bad priest.

It connects Jesus with the history of Israel (a theory we’ll return to) and gives the followers of Jesus a model for resisting temptation. Culpepper also offers an intriguing point about the gospel of John, which does not include this story. Instead, he suggests that there are stories in the Gospel of John that form a basis for Jesus being tempted and resisting temptation in each of these ways. Therefore, the Synoptic version is a condensed poetic expression of what to expect from Jesus.²

Amy Jill Levine in points out in The Jewish Annotated New Testament made extra clear the connections to the Hebrew Bible. First of all, having Jesus in the desert for 40 days “recalls Israel’s testing”.³ That I could have come up with on my own, but then she points out that it connects Jesus to Moses and Elijah. In Deuteronomy 9:9, Moses says, “When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I remained on the mountain for forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water.” 1 Kings 19:8 speaks of Elijah, “He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.” Who knew that the Transfiguration was foreshadowed in Luke? (Not me.) Amy Jill Levine also helps with understanding the role of the Devil in this story. She says that Satan, in Jewish thought is a member of the heavenly court, his role is to test the righteous.”⁴ Now, this doesn’t FIX the story for me, nor does it make me comfortable talking about a personification of temptation, but it softens it enough to make it usable.

Let’s review. Basic theories as to why this story would be included in the Gospels: because Greco-Roman biographies included a story of testing, to clarify what kind of Messiah Jesus was, to show people how to resist temptation (although I’m not sure that quoting scripture really WORKS for this), to establish the trustability of Jesus, to connect Jesus to the history of Israel and Moses and Elijah. If a few of those are actually true, then the story seems to have sufficient reason to exist.

Now that we’re clear on that, I’d like to obsess over the first bit of the story – the temptation regarding bread. I’m still a little testy on this one. It helps a little bit to think of this story as Jesus’ vision quest, but I worry that Jesus simply didn’t have enough money to have enough excess fat on him to be able to survive so long in the desert without food. That is likely taking the story too literally though. More so, I’m concerned about the presentation of food as temptation, and the giving up of food as God-desired sacrifice.

Wandering for 40 days in the desert is certainly a way of recalling the desert wanderings of the people under the leadership of Moses – but they got manna to eat. Of course, both Moses and Elijah are said to go as long with out food, and I suspect the underlying point in both is that God will take care of them, just as the story of the manna in the desert is mean to imply. I am a bit distracted by the rocks that Jesus is said to be tempted to make into bread. I’m not sure why you’d start with rocks anyway, unless you were trying to connect the rocks to the ones that get mentioned in the triumphal entry into Jerusalem story. Remember? The crowds are cheering Jesus and, “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:39-40) While in the beginning of his ministry Jesus shows constraint in his power, it seems like the Gospel suggests that there is an unstoppable growth in the power and energy that surrounds Jesus. Perhaps, in fact, it suggests that while Jesus self-constrains, following Jesus has an energy of its own! I’m not sure, but I think it is interesting.

The passage from Deuteronomy is, like all of Deuteronomy, attributed to Moses as a speech. I think it is one of the more profound passages of the Bible. Moses speaks of the future, to the people who are said to be standing outside the Promised Land looking into it with wonder. Moses will die before they enter. He says them, when you have come into the land and posses it, and settled into it… and all of the instructions we hear today are for that time, although they are spoken to people who are not yet in the land. Deuteronomy tends to conflate generations in meaningful ways, moving backward and forward in time through them.

When a generation came who had settled the land and brought forth fruit from it, they were then to take the first fruits of the land to a priest with a particular story of remembrance. I want you to hear it again,

“Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us. A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.”

Do you hear all the generations? There is the one bringing the fruit, and the ones who lived with the promise of the land, but outside of it. There is a reference to Abraham, the wandering Aramean (and PLEASE remember that this reference to Abraham with today’s national borders would make him a Syrian refugee), the sons of Jacob who went to Egypt, and the many generations who lived there, the generation of the exodus, and the generation who settled the land. All of them interact in this retelling of the story, and the speaker is all of them at once. The best part though, is the conclusion. After the first fruits have been gathered, and taken to the priest in ritual, “Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.” The people are all to eat together in remembrance and celebration.

The generations who knew wealth and plenty remembered what it was to know hardship and hunger, and the celebration of having food becomes the invitation to those who don’t have food to share the bounty. It is a bit like our Community Breakfast, isn’t it? It is a bit like the gifts we give to the church, also.

I’m struck by the contrasting ideas of bread. Granted, the first fruits may not literally have been bread, but let’s assume some of them were grain that may or may not have been baked into bread. It would become bread eventually, so go with me. In Deuteronomy the bread is a blessing, one that moves a person to rituals of gratitude and celebrations of sharing. The bread becomes the reminder of the times without bread, and is thus both a blessing and a symbol of humility. In the Gospel the bread is a temptation, it is a symbol of weakness that the human body would desire food. The comparative Hebrew Bible passages infer that food was unnecessary because of the presence and care of God, but the Gospel acknowledges Jesus’ hunger and need for food, but takes it as weakness. (And people wonder why I like the Hebrew Bible???) In this premise, where bread is temptation, Jesus is good because he doe not bending to the human need for nourishment. This is the same bread that is used in sacrament “This is my body” and in table fellowship, in the giving of the first fruits, and the sharing of the table with Levites and foreigners.

There are those who say that Jesus did well in resisting the temptation, because the temptation was to use his power for his own good. To them I reply: some of our power in life must be used for our own good, God would have it be that way. God does not want us to give away all of our life power and goodness. God calls for everyone to have a full and abundant life. Sometime a sacrifice is called for in order to care for the greater good, but there is no value in sacrificing what is wonderful JUST TO DO SO.

I’m going to assume instead that Jesus had been hungry in the desert long enough to be having delusions, and one of them was that a stone looked like bread. He responded to the delusion with a refusal to break his teeth on a stone, aware that his mind was playing tricks on him. I assume this because along with Deuteronomy and the Communion Table, I affirm that bread and food are good gifts from God with physical and symbolic value. When a person is hungry we are instructed to feed them. That includes ourselves. May we remember the wonder that comes with the food we eat, and the nourishment it gives us, and may we come to every table with gratitude for food and awareness calling us to feed those who are hungry. May we let go of the assumption that sacrifice is inherently good, and return to a sense of the holiness of every day items – including food. Amen

1Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 278.

2 R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 9 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994): 97-98.

3Amy Jill Levine “Notes on Luke” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106.

4Ibid.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 14, 2016

“The Value of Mountaintops” based on Exodus 34:29-34 and Luke…

February 8, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The story of the Transfiguration, as the Gospel lesson is called, comes up every year the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Conveniently, it is found in each of the synoptic Gospels, so there is a different version for every year. Basically, I’m saying that this is the 10^th year in a row that I’ve preached on this story, and I’m sort of amazed that there are new things to notice in it.

The first thing came from this line, “Just as [Moses and Elijah] were leaving Jesus, Peter said to Jesus “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” – not knowing what he said.” It is easy to assume that this is just another story of Peter being an idiot, because if you pay attention to the Gospels that’s a major theme. I’ve suggested that in the past, and talked about how human it is to want to hold on to a moment and memorialize it in physical space. I’ve talked about Peter talking because he is anxious, and not even listening to himself, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Another possibility occurred to me this week. I thought to ask, “where is the mountaintop” and while the particular mountain isn’t definitive, the answer is that it is somewhere in Galilee. That answer is enough. One of the major theological splits between the Southern Kingdom (Judah) and the Northern Kingdom (Israel) was over the correct place to worship YHWH. The Temple was in the South, and the Southerners claimed that the Temple had special significance as a worship center. They dismissed the Northerners as “just worshiping in high places” as if that was heathen.

In fact, the Northerners often DID worship in high places. They built altars and worship spaces on mountaintops and (you’d hope) had pretty great worship experiences there. There really is something profound about being on a mountaintop and the closeness to God experienced there. Perhaps it is the view. Perhaps it is the starkness. Perhaps it is the journey required to get there. Perhaps it is the wind, and the clouds, and the experience of exposure. Perhaps it is the oxygen deprivation. (Really, the mountains in Israel are like the medium sized Catskill mountains. It wasn’t oxygen deprivation.) In any case, the people in the North had been settling up worship sites on mountains for many centuries, while the people in the South had decried it as heresy.

Galilee (in the North), in the time of Jesus, was resettled by Judeans (Southern) who were reclaiming it as a Jewish space. It may be that Peter’s seemingly simple/idiotic ramblings reflected a pretty serious cultural clash in the region they were in. The Gospel of John presents Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman by the well and claiming that God can be worshiped ANYWHERE. The Synoptics don’t have that story. The Gospel of John was written well after the fall of the Temple, while the Synoptic were written in the more immediate aftermath of the fall. I think Peter MAY have been expressing a natural human tendency to want to build a space to give thanks to God on that mountaintop. And I think it may have been heard as heresy!! In fact, I think the story may truncate there because the early Jesus followers weren’t quite sure what do to with the heresy.

Of course, the Northerners weren’t the only ones to have mountaintop experiences. The Hebrew Bible reading tells of Moses coming back down off the mountain where he’d been “conversing with God” and he was so strongly transformed by it that he had a freaky glow to him. There IS something about mountaintops. Sometimes the people who go up them come back quite a bit different.

The second thing that emerged from the gospel reading today came from a colleague in my lectionary group who said, “Hey, isn’t the voice of God literally in the feminine?” I had no idea, but I looked it up and it is! “Voice of God” in Hebrew is bat(h) kol which is literally “daughter of a voice.” Apparently, no matter how wonderful Morgan Freedman is at “playing God,” his voice is all wrong! I’ve been at so many plays and skits and movies where God’s voice has been presumed to be a bass, and yet the words “voice of God” connotes the feminine.

It was at that point that I realized that even in the lesson Gospel I’d always heard the voice of God as male. How is it different if it really is just “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!“ without assuming that me saying it is a little bit wrong? Similarly, how different is it to consider that Moses might have been up the mountain for 40 days hearing a feminine voice telling him all sorts of wisdom and giving guidance?

Now, of course, I’m NOT suggesting that God has a gender, and I’m NOT suggesting that God really speaks like a human and therefore I’m certainly NOT suggesting that God speaks like a girl or woman. I am suggesting that projecting a masculine tone onto God’s voice is inaccurate to Hebrew, and that should keep us all on our toes.

Today is “Camp Sunday,” specially designed to try to get everyone excited about camp and the great things that happen there. It is more toned down than last year because… well, you can’t go big every year. So really, this means that the songs are camp favorites and I get to talk about camp. It has turned out to be remarkably helpful that it is also transfiguration Sunday, as the mountaintop experience of God thing is basically what I’m talking about.

Now, camp is definitely for kids, but it isn’t JUST for kids. As a church, we put down a deposit for the weekend BEFORE Labor Day at Sky Lake for an All Church Retreat with Sabine O’Hara. That’s an experience designed for all ages. All of the Upper New York Camps are also retreat centers, and that’s a great gift for anyone needing to get away. Yet, they started as camps, and that’s important too. For some of you, this is a subtle invitation to consider volunteer counseling. For some of you, this is a mostly irrelevant set of (hopefully uplifting stories). For some of you, this is the motivation you’ve been needing to talk to a kid in your life about camp. But best of all, for some of you, this is an invitation to get yourself to CAMP.

I’ve been thinking this week about what camp was like for me as a camper. At first, it was scary. Simply being away in an unknown environment was overwhelming. Luckily, the first time I went to camp, my pastor’s wife was my counselor and one of my church friends was my cabin mate. My brother and his best friend from church were also at camp, and that made for an easy transition. After that first year, I didn’t care who was there, because I’d realized that at camp I was welcome and liked for who I was.

That may not sound like much, but it was to me. I was a really socially awkward kid, and I got picked on a lot at school. I hadn’t experienced social success in my life until I went to camp. Being in the naturally supportive environment, with an emphasis on cooperation and fun, I was able to thrive and make real connections. I was included, and a part of the group, friends with my cabin mates and family group. I “fit.”

The experience of being welcome, included, and connected changed the way I saw myself, maybe a bit like Moses looking different to others when he came down the mountain. I began to believe it was possible that I could be likable, and that was amazing!

Of course, the way that it all happens at camp is sort of mysterious. Having done 61 weeks at Sky Lake, I still don’t quite know how it works. The components don’t seem like they should be able to add up to the whole. There are meals, some of them cooked over a campfire. There are songs, some of them about God. There is time to swim and boat, to hike and do crafts. There is Bible Study, and there are games. There is usually a dance and often a talent show. Ice cream is usually made, tie die is created, and personal hygiene is occasionally cared for. There is a lot of silliness: water ballet, mud hikes, wacky outfits, kumbaya marathons, belly flop contests (ow!), exceptionally loud praying, and/or ridiculous songs. There is a lot of sacredness: fog on the water, the call of birds, quiet stillness, deep friendships, cooperation and support, laughter, tears, healing, worship, and nature. And somehow, each and every week ends up being a mountaintop experience.

Sometimes I get curious about it. How does it ALWAYS work? What are the component parts that make it work? Why does it work just as well when it is cold and raining as when it is warm and beautiful or miserably hot? Why is it just as great with all ages and ability levels? Why is it always the same and always different?

Why does Christian camping share God’s love so well?? Why are people able to be so much more authentic and supportive at camp than anywhere else? Why is it OK to be who you are at camp when it isn’t at home? How does it WORK? It is a mystery, but it always works. Not every camper (or counselor) has a good week every week, but every week amazing and beautiful things happen and people leave transformed. Camp isn’t for everyone – or so I hear – but for many people it is the most loving (and fun!) place they’ll ever go.

Ever since I first went to camp I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the world more like camp. Eventually I learned the language for kin-dom of God and realized that it IS the world as camp (yet somehow with less bugs for those who need less bugs to have a good time). Mountaintops are very important – both physically and metaphorically – because they help us gain a vision of what IS and what can be. Sometimes the descent is rough and the transition back into “real life” is challenging, but the lessons learned on a mountain can change a whole life, and sometimes a whole society (Moses) or the whole world (the disciples). May it ever be so. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 7, 2016

“Chosen from Many” Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Luke 4:21-30

January 31, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Last weekend the Al-Hidaya Islamic Community Center of Troy and Latham had an open house in their new facility in Latham. It is beautiful space. They’ve been thoughtful about everything. The intersections of ancient symbolism and modern convenience were pretty astounding. In the large gathering space that serves as an entrance to the worship space there are 5 pillars holding up the ceiling to represent the 5 pillars of Islam. There are archways with circles and half circles showing the phases of the moon. The doorways into the worship space are intricately designed with 99 distinct wooden pieces, a reminder of the 99 names of Allah in the Qur’an. Because people enter the holy space without their shoes on, the heat radiates from the floor. There is one of those cool water fountains that exists only to refill reusable water bottles and a nifty machine for making donations to the facility with your credit or debit card.

While at the open house a friend and I were approached by two young women willing to answer any questions we had. So, we asked! Somehow we ended up with the undivided attention of 6 young women, I believe they were all between 16 and 22. I asked them who among them wore the hijab every day, and half of them did. So I asked them why and why not.

Their answers struck me as being remarkably similar to the language of “call” that gets used as part of the ordination process that I know. They spoke about wanting to be visible as representatives of their faith and of reminding themselves and others God’s desire for human kindness. They discussed with each other the issue between wanting to be “good enough Muslim” before wearing the hijab, and wearing it without feeling like their faith was enough but as a process of becoming a more faithful person. They spoke about fitting in – or not – and about norms of behavior in their families. They talked about how their families felt about their choices, and yet how certain they were that the decision was between them and God. They were thoughtful and articulate and incredibly committed to their faith.

Through it all, I was struck by how similar their language was to how I’ve heard clergy speak in Christianity. As I’ve experienced it, the “culture of call” suggests that God particularly picks out people to be clergy and lets them know – usually through a mystical experience, sometimes through the affirmations of others. The call is then assessed through multiple levels of church structure. It is assessed first for a sense of validity and then to see if the “call” lines up with a person’s gifts and graces. At every stage of the process toward ordination there is a conversation about call.

In addition to those young women who got me re-obsessed with call, there are the scriptures this week. The passage from Jeremiah is Jeremiah’s call story. The passage from Luke is Jesus claiming his call, and has Jesus talking about others who were particularly chosen for tasks from God. It seems that the church is justified in its assumptions about call, as they’re well established in the Bible. If God wants a person do to work, God calls that person… or at least that’s how it works in the church… or at least that’s the way the culture of call talks about it.

Having had enough time to move past my naivete with call, here are my concerns about how I’ve heard the church talk about call, particularly with regard to ordination:

It assumes that God has a “plan” for each of us. Or perhaps, only the clergy ;). But I don’t really believe God has a plan, or at least not a stagnant one. We change as we go through life and God adapts to where we are. I don’t believe that God sets us on one particular path in expectation that 30 years later we’ll land somewhere particular. Rather, I suspect that God looks at us where we are and notes where our gifts and skills might be of use, and nudges us towards those places if we listen.
It elevates clergy as somehow “above” laity. To be particular, it suggests that the highest form of faithfulness to God is to become clergy. No experience I’ve had supports this. The church exists because of the faithfulness and commitment of the laity.
It suggests that God cares more about clergy than any other means of building up the kin-dom of God. That is, we usually only talk about call when we are talking about church work. There are A LOT of jobs that need to be done in order to bring in the kin-dom. This whole Jesus-following thing would be useless if all anyone ever did was preach and run churches. If there is such a thing as call it must apply as much to teaching fields, medical fields, administration, sanitation, art, music, caregiving, legislation, supportive work, retail, etc.! The world and the world’s needs are incredibly diverse. God’s work with all people may be to help us find the ways that we can build the kin-dom, but it doesn’t seem reasonable that this happens differently for clergy.
It all sorts of mucks up the difference between God and church. If serving God is about being ordained by the church, that’s a disaster. As amazing as this church is, I’ve always found that when I conflate God and the church I get annoyed with God. Churches are imperfect, struggling, and often beautiful organizations trying to work together to build the kin-dom. But they’re fallible, and they are institutions. Clergy are functionally CEOs of non-profits. God is much bigger and better than that. And, just as a reminder, I suspect that if God does “call” people, the vast majority of those called are called to work outside of churches.
It assumes that God has a “will,” a defined preference for how things go, and our goal is to “discern” it and then “obey” it. This is probably the biggest issue I have with call language. Earlier in my life I believed this, and I’ve struggled to find my way out of it. (#ThanksChrysalis #Sarcastic) These days because I believe that God is present in all places and with all people I believe that God is WITH all of us. Then, the way to access Divine Wisdom is through bodies. Sometimes I access Divine Wisdom through myself (body, mind, and emotions) sometimes through others. If I want to find the “right” or “best” way to act, I need to get quiet enough to listen to my inner wisdom, and trust that God is working in me. This is harder, I think, than it was to externalize the divine. Yet, when I trust that God is at work WITH and IN us as humans, the I’m able to take us more seriously. When the goal was to conform to an external will, then what I cared about was irrelevant. When the goal is to listen to the deepest whispers in myself and remember they are the intersections of God and myself, I become relevant – and you do too.

Now, to be honest, I have a “call story” and I think it is pretty good! It seems only fair to tell you the story that I told hundreds of times on the way to ordination so you can judge it for yourself. It may be shocking, but it was at Sky Lake. I was 13 years old, I had just finished 8^th grade, and I was at music camp. I feel the need to tell you, as I’ve told many others, that I didn’t realize when I went to music camp that EVERYONE was supposed to sing. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have gone. (I’ve done music camp 7 times.) The first night of camp we sat by the lakeshore and the director led a footwashing service. She talked about how Jesus was a different kind of leader than any other leader in history. She talked about how usually important people get served, and how Jesus was the important person who served others. I wanted to be a part of THAT. I wanted to turn the world upside down and redefine what “important” and “leader” meant too. Both the director and the woman she’d invited to wash feet with her were clergy. I therefore assumed, without having language for it, that foot-washing was a sacrament and you had to be ordained to do it.

That’s the point where I’ve traditionally made a joke about God “using my ignorance against me.” Anyway, I had this really intense internal conversation about wanting to be a part of the Jesus foot-washing thing, and not wanting to give up my dreams of being a scientist like my mother and owning my own house. That was the first time it occurred to me that I might want to be clergy.

Well, music camp sang at the ordination service of Annual Conference in those days, so nearly a year later I was present when the Bishop did an altar call at the end of the ordination service inviting people forward to respond to the call to ordained ministry. I felt a strong almost magnetic pull toward that altar, and I remembered that night by the lakeshore, but I wasn’t an impulsive sort of teenager. I decided that I’d wait another year, think about things, come back to Annual Conference, and if I still felt that pull, I’d respond THEN.

I talked to my pastor – but only about my desire to go to Annual Conference, and we set it up. The following year at the ordination service I sat with my friends and felt a magnetic pull to the altar. I was crying, and trying to hide it. The hymns were listed in the order of worship, and I knew when the last one ended. I said to myself (or maybe to God… I’ve usually told this story as if I was talking to God), “Oh well, too late, maybe next year.” Bishop Susan Morrison said, “Its not too late.”

So, I responded, making public and visible the experience I’d had of wanting to be a part of the turning the world upside down Jesus movement, one that I’d been privately contemplating for nearly 2 years. At that point I was sure, and I defined my life based on my experience of call. Sometimes I’ve told the addendum. 8 years after that first lakeside foot washing experience I was back at music camp as a pretty senior staff member at Sky Lake. The same clergy women were there. The director was sick that summer, and after she’d washed feet for a while she asked me to help her stand so she could take a break.

Then she asked me to take her place. I was the only staff member invited to wash feet, and it was the first time music camp had done a footwashing in the intervening years. By that point I was ready to apply to seminary. I loved washing feet in that service, I love it every time I get to do it. As wonderful as that experience was though, I knew in those moments that the call which had started as a desire to wash feet and ordination had been a means to an end had become a desire to serve God as a clergy person. Oh, and the director – she had NO idea that my call to ministry had been set in place in the last footwashing service. She just needed a break.

It’s a good story, right? I suspect if you’d spent years perfecting it, many of you could tell one just as good about your profession.

I have wondered if the idea of call comes out of a deep human need to be special. One of my college professors once pointed out that all fairy tales exist in the struggle between the human need to be special and the human need to fit in. It may be that call is exactly the place that fits that need: all are called (to something and usually many things), but all are called uniquely. We are, after all, all uniquely gifted in the world. And God is willing to work with us all to build the kin-dom. The more of us listen to those subtle whisperings within, the faster the work will be done. So, beloved, I believe YOU are called to build the kin-dom. And thanks be to God for that! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 31, 2016

“Holy, Joy, Sharing”based on Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 and Luke…

January 24, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It strikes me as likely that most of you don’t know anything about Nehemiah. In fact, I would guess that the MORE Biblically knowledgeable among you would be fairly likely to assume that Nehemiah is one of the minor prophets. (This assumes Biblical knowledge, clearly, in understanding what the Minor Prophets are. Minor prophets are the prophets whose books are shorter. That’s all.)

Nehemiah is a book of history. It is bound up with the book of Ezra – apparently they were one book for the first 2000 years or so, but now are considered two. They are books about the return from Exile. Those of you who are here all the time may be getting sick of hearing me explain the Exile, but I don’t want to leave anyone behind. So, hold onto your seats, I’m about to review Basic Biblical history and catch everyone up. I’ll try to be informative without being boring. Wish me luck.

This is a story that starts with Abraham. Abraham heard the call of God to leave the land of his ancestors and start a new life. God made promises to Abraham that he’d be the father of a multitude, and that his descendants were specially blessed to be a blessing to the world. He was married to Sarah, who may or may not have been his half sister. She was barren for a LOOOOOOOONG time, and to make it sound simpler than it was, she eventually had a kid named Issac.

Issac married Rebecca (whose father AND grandfather were Issac’s first cousins), and they were barren for a mere LOONG time and then had twins named Esau and Jacob. Esau was the older twin, but Jacob was the one whom Rebecca and God favored. Jacob was a bit of a trickster, but no more so than his uncle Laban, his mother Rebecca’s brother. He went to live with Laban for a few decades and when he returned he had two wives, two concubines, 12 sons, an unknown number of daughters, and a lot of wealth. Those 12 sons would become the fathers of the 12 tribes.

Jacob’s two favorite sons were Joseph and Benjamin, the sons of Rachel, his favorite wife. (Did I forget to mention that both of Jacob’s wives were his first cousins?) The older of the two was so obnoxious in his status as his father’s favorite that the rest of the sons sold him to slavery in Egypt. The Bible suggests that God favored him, so Joseph eventually became the right hand to the Pharaoh. He instituted a pretty severe taxation system that involved Egypt having great stores of food and the poor people not having any. Meanwhile there was a famine in Israel (which happens in desert climates). The brothers came down to buy grain so they wouldn’t die, it was all sorts of dramatic, but eventually everyone moved down to Egypt.

Then there was a new ruler, the family stopped being in favor, and they became slaves. Then there was Moses, they say about 400 years later. Or, rather, we should say, then there were two very wise, caring,and manipulative midwives who refused direct orders and helped Moses come into the world. His mother and sister were also wise, caring, and manipulative, and Moses (who was supposed to be killed upon his birth because that’s what they were doing to Hebrew babies) got raised as the adoptive grandson of the current Pharaoh.

Then there are some parts you’ve likely heard about: Moses had compassion for his people, but then he killed a guy, so he had to go away; he went into the desert; he had an experience of God initiated by a burning bush, God sent him to be the leader of the people; he whined about his stammer, Aaron got to help; there were conversations, there were plagues, the people were freed; the Pharaoh changed his mind, and the army died in the sea. Or, at least, that’s one of the versions the Bible tells.

Then the people wander in the desert for a few generations. Afterward, Joshua leads them into the land, and after his death for about 300 hundred years, random leaders emerged when the people needed them and otherwise they just settled in. Then the people wanted a King, and they got Saul, and Saul was crazy (maybe), so they got David, and David was a jerk (for sure) and after he died they got Solomon who was really not a whole lot better than Pharaoh. Which is likely why after the death of Solomon there was a civil war and the North seceded from the South. The North gets called Israel, the South is called Judah.

A little over 200 years later the North – Israel – is defeated by the Assyrian empire, goes into exile, and never returns. That’s 722 BCE. About 150 years after that, the South – Judah – gets defeated by the Babylonian Empire (587/586 BCE) and goes into exile. Then in 539 the Persian Empire lead by Cyrus beats out the Babylonian Empire and the exiles are free to go home.

Except a lot of them didn’t. Some went home. They started rebuilding the Temple. But a lot stayed put. About 100 years later a Jewish man named Nehemiah was the cupbearer to the King, and he he heard a report from men from Judah of the terrible lives being led there. It took him to prayer and prayer brought him before the King asking for a favor – to be sent to Judah to rebuild the walls of the city. He was appointed the governor of Judah.

The walls had been down for nearly 150 years. ALL IT TOOK was for someone to organize – the people COULD do it, the issue was that unless everyone did it t the same time it wouldn’t really matter. With Nehemiah’s hope, vision, and money, it worked. Some organized and rebuilt the gates, and then each family rebuilt the part of the wall that was next to their house (or, more likely) a part of their house. It wasn’t that anyone had that much work to do. It is just that unless your neighbors rebuilt too it wouldn’t really help – invaders could still come in.

It took 12 years for Nehemiah to work with the people, to face down the opposition, and to get the walls back up. That’s where our lesson for today comes in – right after the walls were complete. It seems that the people who gathered at the Water Gate hadn’t heard the whole story, all put together, either. The Water Gate was an interesting choice of location for this event, because the Temple had been rebuild. But the Temple didn’t have space for EVERYONE – for men AND women AND children. So they gathered where they could all fit, and they heard their own story from start to finish. (I’d guess that what was read was an early version of the Torah.)

It seems reasonable that the people would weep after hearing it. It is a good story! Furthermore, the story is intentionally designed to bring the past into the present, and for the people who just completed the restoration of Jerusalem, that would be incredibly powerful. They were hearing their stories within the gates and the walls of the city for the first time in 7 generations.

But the command they’re given doesn’t give them time to live in their weeping. They’re told not to weep – not for the 7 generations that missed this chance – not for anything. They’re supposed to PARTY. (I don’t make up the Lectionary. Therefore I don’t make up the PARTY theme. It is in the Bible.) Nor do I make up the theme that the whole deal is that we get to enjoy life as long as we share the joy. Nehemiah told the people, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our LORD; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”

Eat the GOOD stuff. Savor the wonder of it all. And share. Because it is holy, and that’s how it works. From the time of Abraham the idea is “blessed to be a blessing.” When you are able to feast on the richest food there is you should enjoy it, and SHARE. Wow. I really do love the story of Nehemiah. It is the story of what can be done when the people work together. And this passage is the story of the transformative power of worship and the stories of God. The whole book is the story of what can happen when one person’s heart is opened to the blight of others, and it is the story of the restoration. Nehemiah doesn’t just talk about the “good stuff” of life, the book of Nehemiah is some of the good stuff.

Thematically, the Gospel lesson and Nehemiah seem like kindred spirits. The Gospel tells of Jesus at his home synagogue reading the lesson from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because (God) has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. (God) has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.“ The other synoptic gospels put this later in Jesus’s ministry, but Luke seems intentional in putting it right in the beginning. For Luke, this is Jesus’s mission statement. Or maybe this is Luke’s thesis statement.

The words would have already been known to be connected to the Messianic expectation. (Which by the way is also all about the Exile, but I can leave that for another day.) They’re words we still use in our formal Communion liturgy. They are powerful words. They are words of restoration. They are words that reflect God’s care for all of God’s people, and not just the ones that societies tend to think are of value.

God wants a message brought to the poor – and it is good news for them.

God sends a message to the captives – and it is release of their captivity for them.

God messenger is to bring sight to the blind.

God’s work is to let the oppressed become free again.

God’s story is the proclamation of the jubilee.

The Jubilee is another Hebrew Bible idea that doesn’t get enough press. It is the Torah law that says that every 49 years all the fields are to lay fallow, all debts are to be forgiven, and all land is to be returned to its original owners. Jubilee is one of the ways that God’s vision for community in the Torah prevents cycles of poverty. For Jesus to read this passage is to connect his life with the care for the poor, the sick, and the oppressed, and the incarcerated.

Luke put this story at the beginning of his Gospel because he thought this was the point. The life of Jesus participated in God’s work of freedom, healing, and transformation. To be poor in Jesus’s time was similar to being poor today and being poor in the time of Nehemiah – it increased the chance you would die young after having struggled mightily. God isn’t interested in leaving people in those conditions.

Which means that for Luke, the work of the Body of Christ (US!) is that vision from Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because God has anointed us to bring good news to the poor. God has sent is to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Or, maybe we like it from Nehemiah, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared…”

We are to care for each other, and enjoy the goodness of life, and work toward a more just world. Let’s get back to it! Amen

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Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 24, 2016